People cluster into homogenous groups, which can make diversity a difficult goal to achieve. What is mean for You? Enjoy our content below:

The old saying goes that birds of a feather flock together, and there’s a lot of truth in that. Just look at how US elections are split between increasingly polarized Democrats and Republicans.

And science confirms the proverb: humans tend to cluster into groups of people similar to themselves.

In 2009, sociologists Duncan Watt and Gueorgi Kossinets sat down to examine the email flow between the students at a large American university over the course of a year. They not only kept track of the emails and new recipients that appeared; they also created student profiles detailing age, gender, course choices and a number of other attributes.

Watt and Kossinets found that students who shared similar characteristics were far more likely to get in contact with one another.

However, they also discovered that this occurred because similar students tended to hang out in the same places on campus, studied in the same department or were even in the same course of study.

A preference for similar people had consequences over time, too. Similar people started to cluster, and so the likelihood of meeting more similar people just kept on increasing.

The repercussions of this sort of behavior are plain to see: people’s preference for more of the same makes it harder to establish diversity.

Entrepreneurs and journalists Alex Blumberg and Matt Lieber learned just that in 2015, soon after founding Gimlet Media, a company that develops and sells podcasts.

They noticed that their staff was almost entirely white, liberal and cosmopolitan, and they soon realized what had caused this. Blumberg and Lieber had mainly been recruiting from among their fellow New York-based journalists. And that was itself a replicating pool of talent that had been attracting similar types for decades.

While they were happy that the company was doing well, they also recognized the importance of diversity, and that it wasn’t going to happen by itself – they would have to consciously start recruiting people from more diverse backgrounds.


There’s a lesson in this example. Networking works best when you connect with different groups. Therefore, you’ll have to make a deliberate effort to do that so you don’t end up mingling with carbon copies of yourself and no one else.